Saturday, February 14, 2015

Surely, it’s an important topic. It’s an important moment in
a friendship.

What do you do, Elizabeth Bernstein asks, when a friend
confides that he or she is having marital problems?

I have hesitated to write about this for a simple reason. In
many cases it depends on whether you are male or female and whether your friend
is male or female. When a woman confides in a female friend, it's not the same as talking to a male friend. All of
it is different from what happens when a man confides in a male friend or when
a male confides in a female friend.

Portraying these interactions in gender neutral terms muddles the issues.

Anyway, Bernstein poses the question:

Sooner
or later, someone in the depths of a marital or relationship problem will want
to talk about what’s going on and possibly to ask for advice. Being there for
that person—a family member, a friend or even a work colleague—is challenging.
No one teaches us how to give emotional support.

When
someone we care about confides in us, a common instinct is to make this person
feel better at all costs. We may offer false hope or criticize the spouse or
partner, and if we are close to this person, their distress may become our
distress. But these reactions aren’t helpful.

This assumes that we are being asked to give emotional
support. At times, we are. In many cases we are being asked for something else.

Whenever you find yourself in that situation, expert William
Doherty recommends that you be a friend, not a therapist.

One agrees wholly.

One does not exactly know what is meant by the terms, but
perhaps that sounds like caviling.

Some people want their friends to feel their pain. They do
not want to be alone with their anguish. Some people want to hear a more
objective perspective about the situation. Some people want to talk it out
because talking, like writing is a distancing process. They want to know
whether they are missing something or doing something wrong. At times, they
suspect something that they cannot quite articulate or are afraid to see.

A friend knows the difference and offers the right kind of
guidance.

Bernstein reports Doherty’s view:

In his
research, Dr. Doherty found people who confide in a friend say it is most
helpful if the friend simply listens. Confidants also can help by giving
emotional support and helping the confider put the situation in perspective.
They often can help a person understand his or her contribution to the problem
or where the spouse is coming from.

Confidants
can make mistakes. They say judgmental things or talk too much about
themselves. They take sides. They try to fix the problem. “Don’t confuse being
a confidant with being an advice giver,” Dr. Doherty warns.

It is fair to say that therapists sometimes make mistakes
too.

Again, it depends on context and on the nature of the
friendship.

Doherty suggests that confidants should not give advice, but
a confidant, not a therapist, has the better, more close up view of the
situation. The confidant might have seen the couple interact in different
social situations over a considerable time period.

A confidant might feel that it is none of his business to
point out obvious problems, but, when a couple is in crisis he might need to
offer an opinion, the better to steer the situation in a more constructive
direction.

Most confidants do their best not to get involved, but a
true friend will take sides. To suggest otherwise is an error. If a friend’s marriage is in trouble, he or she
might need to know his friends will be loyal to him. Not taking sides will feel like a betrayal.

Loyalty is the definition of friendship.

At times it might be helpful to tell someone that he is
having a problem because he is acting like a clod. It might be helpful to tell
him that he has done nothing wrong.

Since Doherty is a mental health professional, he will at
some point suggest that your friend, whose marriage is crumbling around him or
her needs empathy.

As we know, therapists believe that empathy can solve all
problems. It’s like Tiger Balm for the soul.

As it happens, they are wrong. Sometimes it helps to be able
to commiserate. It is especially helpful when commiseration feels like a sign
of loyalty. At other times, empathy is bad medicine.

In Bernstein’s words:

Try to
empathize with the person’s pain, not the details of their story. Reflect the
person’s feelings back (“I can see how hurt you were when you felt put down by
your wife in front of your friends”). Nonverbal communication—a look, a
touch—goes a long way.

Such might be the case where your friend is mourning a
relative who just died. In that context sympathy is appropriate. Nothing can be
done so you feel the person’s pain.

And that is the point about someone
who is in mourning. You offer emotional support because you can do nothing to
bring the deceased back.

But, if all you can offer is empathy or sympathy you are signaling
that the situation is hopeless, that nothing can be done.

If your friend’s marriage is on the line, you should not act
as though it is dead. If you do you will be telling your friend that it’s over,
there’s nothing more to do. You will be facilitating its demise.

In some circumstances, not hard to imagine, someone might be
talking to you in order to gain some distance and some objective perspective about his or
her situation. In that case, the details of the story matter and your friend
might need to talk about some of them.

On the other hand, revealing too many intimate and personal
details might be embarrassing for your friend. And since your job is to support
your friend’s morale, details that show him or her at his or her worst will not
help him out.

Drawing the line is not easy.

In Bernstein's example a man's wife put him
down (or appeared to do so) in front of friends.

She recommends an empathetic response, to the effect that
you should feel your friend’s pain.

In the first place, if the man who was thus humiliated
merely feels hurt he is doing something wrong. He should feel anger toward his
wife and he should be questioning both her character and her commitment to the
marriage.

If your friend is too angry, he might be trying to figure
out how to avenge the insult. Before he resorts to drastic measures, he should
ask himself whether it was an accident or intentional, whether she has done it
before, whether she apologized, either to him or in front of the group, or
whether she believes that she did anything wrong.

You cannot really tell him what to do, but you can help him to
get a handle on the situation and to evaluate his options. To do so you need to
help him to take a step back from what happened, even if that means helping him
to get his mind off of it.

For what it’s worth, putting down your spouse in front of
other people is one of the most egregious errors you can make. The damage is
not going to be repaired by whining about your hurt feelings. If you whine, you
will be suggesting that you deserved to be put down.

Of course, that is an extreme case. In less extreme cases
marital conflicts and difficulties require negotiation. They will require
compromise, and compromise involves work, not a warm bath of empathy.

Clearly, a professional will be in the best position to help
a spouse find a way to negotiate a compromise. A friend, less so.

And yet, a friend will probably know more about the
situation than will even the best therapist. A friend might not be able to help
negotiate a compromise, but he should certainly point things in that direction… rather
than feeling his friend’s pain.

A good friend can also help in judging the effectiveness of
any therapeutic intervention. Not all therapists are very adept at cobbling out
a compromise.

1 comment:

re: "For what it’s worth, putting down your spouse in front of other people is one of the most egregious errors you can make. The damage is not going to be repaired by whining about your hurt feelings. If you whine, you will be suggesting that you deserved to be put down."

I don't disagree with this assessment categorically, but the word "deserved" stands out, and indeed, what if you have a guilty conscience and you BELIEVE you deserved to be put down?

And higher you say:

re: "In the first place, if the man who was thus humiliated merely feels hurt he is doing something wrong. He should feel anger toward his wife and he should be questioning both her character and her commitment to the marriage."

It seems wrong to me to say what people "should feel", but this helps show the one nature of feelings, i.e. what my men's group call "The Awareness cycle", starting at observation, then following by a judgement, and then followed by a feeling, and finally an action. So the idea is we need to separate observations, from judgements from feelings, and then no one can "make us" feel anything. In all cases we have a choice how we are to respond to other people's behavior.

A few days agi I found an 8 hour program on Nonviolent Communnication with Marshall Rosenberg, who died last week at age 80, and listened to most of it, and took some notes.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql5hywRyqgo

He has his own perspective on how therapy fails to produce change, but he focused on the idea of identifying needs. Some of it is very interesting.

Also he said: @3:08-3:12--------------* Needs are universal. All human beings have the same needs. * A need contains no reference to specific persons taking specific actions. * A request is a strategy to get your needs met. Never get addicted to your requests or strategy. This makes requests into demands and threatens people's autonomy. * Nonviolent communication's intention is to create a quality of communication where everyone can get their needs met.--------------

I find the separation of needs and strategies useful, just like separating observations from judgments from feelings.

Anyway, so I agree a "good confidant" should try to be a friend, not a therapist, but all of these processes seem to me to be about inquiry, finding out what's going on inside of you, and enabling perspective taking so a person is not REQUIRED to be angry by the behavior of others.

Another quote I copied, Rosenberg said: "Never give anyone the power to make you submit or rebel."

So that's obviously expressing the need for autonomy, and the idea is to recognize some behaviors are "giving away your power", and there's two directions to that, being provoked is taking away your power, and staying silent when you know something important needs to be said.

But lastly, back to the confidant, there's clearly a lot of guessing, and a lot of chances to be wrong in anything you do or say, and so it may be impossible to be cautious enough.

But maybe Rosenberg is right, and if you can listen and reflect back what unmet needs you can see expressed, maybe that can help a person see themselves better?